Kirrus’ Blog

Karmic notebook Theme

Finally got around to upgrading to Karmic Ubuntu, and so far Its looking good. There is a few oddities in the theme, which makes using it a bit annoying, but I guess I’ll get used to it. See the screen-shot below for what I mean, the strangeness of the interface The bar at the top, the new greying out an in of active icons all help to make the best use of this screen size. You can tell the design team are doing good work

One small problem, is the lack of a clock, or logout button. For some strange reason, both didn’t make it, and hitting the power button no longer brings up the shutdown interface. I’ve been using the command ‘shutdown -h now’ in a terminal for the moment, will have to dig around, see why it isn’t there/coming up later.

Dear web

Dear web-connected people. A friend asked me recently, do you know of an opensource wiki software that can intergrate with ldap. Any one know of one, or have any ideas? Please comment if you do!

It looks like someone likes Ubuntu..

An ubuntu symbol, from satellite view?!

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&ie=UTF8&t=h&ll=52.583156,-0.055768&spn=0.00442,0.009656&z=17

(http://tinyurl.com/ybuxvxn)

Quick useful sysadmin stuff

Two useful things I have found or use

Firefox Awesomebar search trick

A wonderful tip, that someone sent into the ubuntu-uk podcast. (I can’t remember who, or the episode. Comment if you know and I’ll credit them here! )

You can search, in any website’s search function, using firefox’s address bar. Now, at first glance this sounds really boring and useless, but it really isn’t, at all.

First, we need to find a website to search. Let’s use launchpad’s bugs search, for Ubuntu. So, we go here:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/

Then, right click on the search box, and click “Add a keyword for this search”. This brings up the standard bookmark – your search keywords are stored as a bookmark. Give it a useful name, something to help you next time you go sorting through your book marks. Now, the keyword is how we use this trick. I’m going to use “bugs”, but you can use anything you want, just remember, this is the word you put before your search string in the address bar. Click Add.

Now, all we have to do, is to search for a bug. Let’s use the classic bug 1.

Open a new tab (CTRL + T), then in the address bar type [your keyword] microsoft market share, and hit enter.

Lo and behold:

Testing SMTP-AUTH the fast way

Found a really handy little command line program called “swaks”. Great if you’ve ever needed to test SMTP-AUTH, and didn’t want to have to base64 the username and password yourself. Here’s a quick rundown on the command and flags I use with them. (Should be fairly obvious, comment if not!)

swaks -s [smtp-server-name-or-ip] -au [smtp-auth-user] -ap [smtp-auth-password] -f [from-address-of-testing-email]

Hit enter, and it’ll ask you the “to” email address. Type it in, and it gives you the full connection readout, just as if you were doing it with telnet (or netcat) on the command line:

<- 220 smtp.our-domain.com ESMTP
-> EHLO gemini
<- 250-smtp.our-domain.com
<- 250-AUTH LOGIN
<- 250-AUTH=LOGIN
<- 250-PIPELINING
<- 250 8BITMIME
-> AUTH LOGIN
<- 334 Z29vZCB0cnkgOikK

And so on.

Feats of Tweet

The old twitchhiker, the guy who got half-way around the world in 30 days (i.e. all the way to new zealand), just through people providing help on twitter for free, has started a new project. He’s called it “feats of tweet”. It looks like it could be quite impressive, and powerful. Here’s a brazenly stolen snippet from his sites FAQ:

What is a Feat of Tweet?

A Feat of Tweet is a goal, ambition, target or wish realised through the goodwill of the Twitter community.

Whose wishes and goals are we trying to fulfill? Yours. They may be personal in nature, or charitable. It may take the actions of dozens, even hundreds of tweeps to achieve a feat… or it it may take just one.

Continues here: http://featsoftweet.com/feats/faq/

They’re just getting started now, the website is still under construction! If you’re interested, you can find the site here: http://featsoftweet.com and the twitter feed here: http://twitter.com/FeatsofTweet. Right now, they want as many followers as possible, before the project goes active, so the first few feats have a good chance of getting off the ground

phpmyadmin in ubuntu now being exploited en-masse

Update: ubuntu patched this issue a couple of days after this post. If you’re reading, thanks guys! You just made my job a lot easier

At some point, I might try to look at helping maintain this, and other packages like it in the ubuntu archive. No idea how, though a colleague may be able to help…

———————–

The versions of phpmyadmin in ubuntu (at least Dapper – Intrepid) are susceptible to arbitrary code execution, as the web-server’s user. A bug¹ was reported on the 15th of June about this issue, and marked as high priority on the 21st.

The phpmyadmin team patched this problem in their software on May the 24th. ²

Debian patched this in their system on the 25th of June.

I tried talking to people on #ubuntu-security about this problem. They said “motu” and “we’re not interested, its in universe”. I tried talking to people in #motu, and they talked about work-arounds.

The main questions now are:

• Please can someone work on the bug?
• Why did it take so long between upstream report and launchpad report?
• Why has the bug been left to the point where it is getting automatically exploited, en-masse? ³

BBC – Mixed results for green IT goals

BBC NEWS | Technology | Mixed results for green IT goals.

Nice new BBC news article, about how the majority of govt~ IT managers don’t know that they’re supposed to be reducing their carbon footprint.

One of the hints is that the “proliferation” of “air conditioning of server rooms” (among other things) is the cause.

I’d like to see you run a datacentre (tonns of computer servers, really big pipe to the internet etc) without airconditioning. If we turn ours off for 10 minutes, the temperature gets swealtering. 30 minutes and old harddrives start failing. Dumb.

Current Cost – watt hours and pachube

This is an email i sent to JT  so I apologise if it doesn’t make sense to y’all. Please ask questions if you don’t get me!

So we have this ‘Current Cost’ meter thing (free from Southern Electric) at the house. It’s a small wireless electricity meter. Well it’s more of a monitor or display actually but you get me….[insert pic].

Long story short, I’d noticed the RJ45 on the bottom and it’d got me wondering. A few google searches later and whammo i’d found what I needed. A bit of hardware, a bit of software (links on manyfacturers website!) and whammo….

I wired up the current cost (enegry meter) at the house to my laptop and it’s uploading to this Pachube (bless you) website:
http://www.pachube.com/feeds/2196

The graph is a bit useless atm (no history or dates on it ) but the program here:
http://apps.pachube.com/google_viz/
Could probs snazz it up a bit.
There seems to be a binary pattern from some device that is turning on and off at regular intervals and using ~100w… i wonder if it’s the compressor on the fridge/freezer as it goes on thru the night lol.

The long jittery spikes are the washing machine/dishwasher/tumble dryer (the last being the biggest draw lol).

One guy is even trying to record signatures for each appliance and then work out from the data which appliance is causing the spikes.
http://chrishodgins.tumblr.com/post/33810511/via-chart-apis-google-com-so-its-the-bank
The idea behind this is if you can work that out, you can make a pie chart of the biggest consumers…

I have more results than are uploaded; i created a funky excel file which Should update from the mdb created from one of the apps i’m using but atm i think the file is locked or summat . Made a pretty graph to! Also predicting the future temperature based on a polynominal curve or something lol.

All gd fun. Now i jus want one of these tiny minuture computers:
http://www.fit-pc.co.uk/fit-pc-slim.html
or this awesome plug pc:
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/258238/plug-sized-pcs-arrive-in-uk.html (sweet) (Ubuntu on a plug [ via Youtube])
to record/upload the results, although it would make more sense to use the ipcop or home server since they are always on and the current cost device is wireless. (unfortunately our model does not have internal data logging ). Don’t know how to work out kwh from current usage of watts every 3 seconds… i might be able to put something from averages tho. Any suggestions  anyone? I might just be being dumb lol.

Now all we need is the x10 plug thru devices to monitor electricty usage (by appliance) and bobs your uncle – we know exactly where the electricity is going.

IMO  (as a soon to be Building services engineer in training) this technology should be wired into all new houses in the actuall plug sockets. Want to know which of your kids (or indeed partner) is using the most electricity?

The trickle usage these measuring devices could be designed to run on could easily be offset by a small(ish) solar pv installation too! (i’m talking around 10-30wh/day here ).

Oh and here’s how to connect the current cost to pachube:

http://community.pachube.com/?q=node/100

On the upside i’ve also unplugged the fancy pants MPPT  solar charge controller and hooked the install back up to the basic on/off controller, and now it’s definetly shifting amps! I was a bit worried that in full sun 53watts of panels was ONLY putting through 0.3-0.1a @11.7 (i know, discharged). Hmm gonna have to find out whats wrong with fancy pants, he wasn’t cheap! :’(

Dear Apache

Dear Apache. My idea of fun is not to find out about a missing log directory, when I test a website after a restart. My idea of fun would be for apache2ctrl configtest to actually, you know, work. Or, even better, don’t utterly die when you’re missing a log directory.

GRRRRR

Dear Customer. Please make sure you remove apache configuration, when you delete your users. I don’t enjoy being woken at 6am because logrotate restarted apache. Athough, on the upside, at least I get paid for it.

Youtube Comments…

Johnathon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqUfPhMxmAg&feature=related
Paul: Q Ruled
Paul: There’s something very impressive about that clip
Paul: read the comments.
Paul: they’re youtube belmer free!! That’s stunning no “WAT IS THIS? THATS GAY!”
Johnathon: Probably the vidoes uploader has been doing some filtering
Paul: maybe
Johnathon: well, what’s the likelyhood that youtube has suddenly become a haven for well-spoken, well-mannered individuals?
Paul: Some combination of incredibly unlikely events
Paul: a pig flying through hell as it freezes over during a blue moon at midnight
Paul: on feb 30th during a centenary leap year
Paul: the last bit is only once every 400 years